This companion book to the excellent 2015 Getty Center exhibition of WWI art gathers 14 essays about 14 artists by 14 art historians. Their commentaries are uniformly excellent in their balancing biography, culture, and brief analyses of or observations about …

William Conelly’s wonderful new poetry collection, Uncontested Grounds (Able Muse Press, 2014), includes five war poems well worth our attention. Conelly is a veteran of the United States Air Force, although the war poems here come not from his personal …

Unlike most books of poetry, which are collections of separate poems ignoring each other like subway commuters, Lorene Delany-Ullman’s Camouflage for the Neighborhood is better understood, in fact only understood, as a single coherent work, the whole being far greater …

Laila Halaby’s My Name On His Tongue (Syracuse University Press, 2012) is a frighteningly urgent and incisive poetry book about living the Arab-American experience. Naomi Shibib Nye claims Halaby’s words are “a wake up call” and they certainly are. Take …

Carolyn Forche’s 1994 The Angel of History is a literary powerhouse of artistic prowess, an astringent truthful poetry that rewards us with the moribund brutality of war and its shattering aftermath. There is no nostalgia or moral judgment, but a …

If Alice Oswald’s Memorial is not the greatest English-language war poem of modern times, I can hardly wait to discover a better one. The new American edition (Norton, 2012) includes a useful Afterword by Eavan Boland.

Michael Casey has taken to heart the once revolutionary idea that American poetry should be in the vernacular, reflecting the way people actually speak. Like Walt Whitman, but with his ego under control, Casey is “no sentimentalist, no stander above …

If you liked Michael Casey’s poems about the Viet Nam War in his award-winning Obscenities, as well you should, you’ll also enjoy this second collection. Casey employs the same casual, idiosyncratic style to present anecdotes told in the voice …